This is a (relatively) recent addition to tmux, I remember this being an annoyance a while ago, and you can find the discussion on GitHub if you search.

Heh, but if its in Debian stable then its probably not recent.

It was added upstream in 2020. Since tmux is often used on servers that don’t upgrade frequently, I still regularly work on some servers without this feature.

In related news, Vim just added XDG support upstream as well. Just waiting for Zsh to follow suit now :)

I've been working around this on Zsh by using ~/.zshenv to source the rest of the config from ~/.config/zsh for years now.

I would welcome the change.

Same for .aws (the motivating example), kind of

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sdkref/latest/guide/file-locatio...

I don't see an option for the whole .aws folder. I'm sure some random stuff gets out in there, but for the life of me I can't think of any other files besides credentials and config.

Maybe some credential provider scripts/hooks? But in that case i think you can just specify the location wherever it is already... IDK.

The biggest utility I could see boxxy for is when other tooling doesn't honor those env cars/alternate configs from default. But... I mean symlinks always worked fine for me.. but I gotta admit this is better, and I'm thinking about installing it just to see what boxxy scan comes up with. I recently did a bunch of work to clean up my devenv and get it in .zshenv, this could help with that.

> then looks for a user configuration file at ~/.tmux.conf [...] or ~/.tmux.conf

If the tmux devs are confused then it looks like a perfect example of why we need a standard for `.config` or similar. I have proposed something similar in the past for code repositories to remove the config file clutter to a subdirectory, but it's hard to gain traction.

> it looks like a perfect example of why we need a standard

A standard wouldn't fix mistakes in the manpage. What is your proposal?

I took the message to be is that your home directory doesn't actually belong to you and you should store most of your work elsewhere on the system.

Now I just have a `/work` folder and I don't have to care what applications want to do with their configurations.

This looks like a careless mistake to me, not really a fundamental confusion :-)

I've been using symlinks for Vim and Tmux for ages and waited for them to catch up. Seems they've done it, finally.

It's a well-known tool and the example is one which people will very often encounter. A lot of tooling is terribly behaved, regardless of this specific example.